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Joe Negron, president of the Florida Senate, is nothing if not methodical.

He plots. He researches. He builds alliances, both through his political fundraising and his personal connections.

He's cautious, sometimes to a fault. During interviews with journalists (including me), the Republican attorney from Stuart doesn't answer questions he's not asked, and he never reveals how he votes on his personal ballot.

Negron is systematic about relationship-building, too. Nobody who has met him would call him a social butterfly — but he remembers small facts about people, then peppers conversations with those tidbits. When I first met Negron about a decade ago, he mentioned my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, almost every time I interviewed him.

So it makes sense that, methodically, he arrived at his first central policy effort as Florida Senate president: buying 60,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee to help stop discharges to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries.

Negron is no dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist. He has taken political donations from sugar companies (a practice he later stopped), and the law firm he just resigned from represents U.S. Sugar Corp.

Negron started on one side of this issue (a side where he primarily bashed the Army Corps of Engineers), but he could not stay there. Visibly deplorable conditions in his district's waterways forced him to evolve. He had to become part of a state-led solution.

His position shifted slowly — and that's why it's laughable that opponents of his proposed land buy, including sugar company reps, are painting the idea as some knee-jerk notion rooted in "fake science."

To understand the evolution of Negron's views, let's go back to 2013. That year the water quality in the St. Lucie River was so terrible, it forced the health department to warn people not to touch the water.

That summer, known as the "Lost Summer of 2013", Negron organized legislative hearings in Stuart to address the pollution, but he remained publicly reluctant about an option to buy U.S. Sugar's land south of Lake Okeechobee.

In 2014, Negron found $250,000 in the state budget for the University of Florida’s Water Institute to develop “a comprehensive plan for moving water south from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades.” The study's goal: to map out the best way to store, clean and move water south when Lake O gets too full.

In 2015, the UF Water Institute report was publicly released. Among its conclusions: The state should consider buying land south of Lake Okeechobee to stop discharges from flowing into the St. Lucie River.

Negron's reaction at the time: He supported “seriously considering” it.

But money for a land buy never made it into the state budget in 2015, despite Negron's attempts.

It wasn't until last year, after what we've come to call "Mean Green 2016" — when toxic algae bloomed on the St. Lucie River, drawing international media attention — that Negron announced a plan to buy land south of Lake Okeechobee.

And, last month, one of Negron's allies in the legislature filed a more bill to do so. Senate Bill 10 proposes the state buy 60,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee to store, treat and move water from Lake Okeechobee. Proceeds from Amendment 1, approved by 75 percent of voters in 2014, would be used to pay for the project.

Over the past four years, Negron has incrementally advanced a policy agenda that has led to this moment.

The timing is fortuitous. He now is the most powerful lawmaker in the Florida Senate. If he closes this deal, it will be a game-changer for the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon — and all the marine and tourism businesses that depend on their health.

"My goal is to reduce and ultimately eliminate the releases,” he told me in 2014.